Choosing Community: John Dewey's Timeless Wisdom for Modern Schools
In my previous blog post I explored the Surgeon General's call to "choose community" and its implications for schools. But what does "choose community" actually look like in the context of education? How do we create learning environments that prioritize collaboration and shared experience?
Over a century ago John Dewey, a philosopher and educational reformer, offered a compelling model for precisely this kind of education. While the current hype around generative AI for personalized tutoring suggests a future of hyper-individualized learning, Dewey makes the strong argument that true learning is a social endeavor. Dewey can help us envision and create a fundamentally different version of education, one that prepares students not to primarily absorb information, but to actively shape their world through collaboration and meaningful experience.
The traditional image of schooling, with students lined up in rows and columns, silently absorbing information, is deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness. While it is unfair to characterize the majority of today’s classroom time like this, the picture persists and continues to influence thinking about education. We see echoes of this traditional view in the current enthusiasm for AI-driven personalized learning. While the technology is new, the underlying premise remains the same: education is seen as a process of individual information absorption, although with the claim that this is now faster and more efficient.
But this individualistic approach to education comes at a cost. Today the ability to collaborate effectively and to work together to solve complex problems is more critical than ever. Employers consistently rank skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking as top priorities. The World Economic Forum, for instance, has repeatedly highlighted complex problem-solving and collaboration as essential skills for the future workforce. An emphasis on individual achievement and knowledge absorption will fail to adequately cultivate these crucial skills. We need a vision for education that recognizes the inherently social nature of learning and actively fosters collaboration and shared experience. And it turns out that John Dewey provided such a vision over a century ago.
Dewey argued that the mind is fundamentally social, shaped through interactions and shared experiences. As he wrote, “Mind…is the power to to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared situations” (quotes from Democracy and Education, Dover Edition. This from page 32). This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding knowledge as tools for navigating and shaping our social world. Learning is not just about acquiring information; it's about using what you know in collaboration with others.
This requires active participation and shared activity. Dewey argues that schools need to provide more opportunities for "conjoint activities" where students can learn by doing, together. “While books and conversations can do much,” he wrote, “these agencies are relied upon too exclusively. Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunities for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used” (p. 39). Dewey's call for "conjoint activities" resonates deeply with the need for students to develop the collaboration skills that are so essential in the 21st-century workforce.
Dewey's vision for education offers a powerful alternative to the traditional, individualistic model of education and its current version as seen in AI-driven personalized learning. He reminds us that learning is a social, experiential, and inherently human endeavor. By embracing Dewey's ideas, we can create learning environments where students are not just passive recipients of information, but active participants in the construction of their own knowledge. It’s time to reflect on Dewey's wisdom and consider how we can work together to create more social and active learning environments. By doing so, we can truly choose community.
